Dmitri Woods, Appellant, v. Gloria Geither, Warden, Appellee. (2026)

MEMORANDUM OPINION

Dmitri Woods appeals the Leavenworth County District Court's dismissal of his habeas corpus petition challenging his continued placement in restrictive housing as an inmate at the Lansing prison. Based on written submission and the arguments of the lawyers for Woods and the Kansas Department of Corrections (KDOC), the district court dismissed the petition, filed under K.S.A. 60-1501, as untimely and as failing to state a constitutional violation. We find the district court erred in both respects.

During the prison grievance process, when Woods represented himself, the then-warden at Lansing affirmatively misled him as to the appropriate steps to exhaust his administrative remedies—a necessary prerequisite to filing the 60-1501 petition. After Woods filed his petition, the KDOC argued he waited too long precisely because he relied on the warden's misrepresentation. Consistent with the doctrine of quasi-estoppel and the basic concepts of fair play that undergird the adjudicatory process, the KDOC may not succeed with that sort of inequitable gameplaying. See Wichita Fed'l Savings & Loan Ass'n v. Black, 245 Kan. 523, 536, 781 P.2d 707 (1989) (recognizing quasi-estoppel).

Given the procedural posture of the case, we and the district court must accept the factual allegations in Woods’ petition and inferences reasonably drawn from those allegations in assessing the legal sufficiency of Woods’ claims. Woods alleged he has been in restrictive housing continuously since December 2020 and has substantially less freedom than prisoners in the general prison population. Those allegations sufficiently state a claim for deprivation of a constitutionally protected liberty interest at the pleading stage. See Jamerson v. Heimgartner, 304 Kan. 678, 685-86, 372 P.3d 1236 (2016).

We, therefore, reverse the district court's dismissal of Woods’ 60-1501 petition and remand with directions that the district court reinstate the petition, appoint a new lawyer to represent Woods, and conduct an appropriate hearing on the merits of the claims.

Factual and Procedural History

We draw the factual and procedural signposts from the appellate record in this case that includes the petition, the KDOC's response, and documents from the administrative process Woods took to challenge his ongoing placement in restrictive housing.

After an administrative determination that Woods stabbed two employees of the El Dorado prison, where he was then confined, he was transferred to the Lansing prison in December 2020 and immediately placed in restrictive housing. Restrictive housing is a blanket term the KDOC now uses to describe what had been called administrative segregation and disciplinary segregation, covering the separation of an inmate from the general prison population either because of safety and management concerns or as a punishment for rules infractions. Criminal charges were filed against Woods in Butler County District Court and apparently dismissed without a judgment.

Woods has been kept in restrictive housing continuously since his transfer to Lansing more than five and a half years ago. He apparently remains in restrictive housing for his own safety and the safety of others confined in or working at the prison. Woods has a less than sterling prison record, including infractions for violent conduct.

The record shows that Woods has filed a series of grievances essentially questioning his continued placement in restrictive housing and requesting a concrete plan for his release to the general prison population. The KDOC has frequently replied with general responses that it was working on a plan. We see nothing to suggest that the KDOC has implemented some sort of particularized way for Woods to demonstrate that he could be placed in the general prison population.

We set out a chronology to place the district court's finding of untimeliness in context. On March 3, 2025, Jesse Howes, then the warden of the Lansing prison, sent Woods a letter (in the form of a memo) stating that his “grievance ․ about remaining on long term status” in restrictive housing “ha[s] been addressed and will continue to be assessed.” The memo outlines reasons why Woods cannot be placed in the general prison population and offers no specific steps that Woods could take to achieve that placement. Warden Howes’ response is on KDOC letterhead that includes this admonition at the bottom: “If this response is not satisfactory, you may appeal by submitting the appropriate appeal form, available from your Unit Team to the secretary of corrections.“ The admonition also states the time for appealing and advises that the appeal should specifically describe the reasons for disagreeing with the result and what action the Secretary of Corrections should take. Woods filed an appeal with the Secretary of the KDOC.

In a letter dated March 20, 2025, the Secretary's designated representative informed Woods that he had used the wrong grievance procedure and form because his complaint concerned his classification and placement. The letter referenced his grievance as being “[i]nvalid.” The appellate record shows Woods received the March 20 letter on April 16. Woods’ 60-1501 petition recites that it and the accompanying exhibits were presented to Lansing prison officials on April 30 for filing with the district court. The clerk of the district court filed the petition on June 3, 2025. For purposes of this appeal, that timeline is undisputed.

The district court issued a writ; directed Gloria Geither, as the acting warden of the Lansing prison and the proper defendant in an action under K.S.A. 60-1501, to respond; and appointed a lawyer for Woods. The KDOC lawyer duly answered and asked that the writ be dissolved and the petition dismissed because Woods failed to timely file his petition and failed to allege a protected liberty interest to support his substantive claims. Woods’ lawyer did not file a response. But Woods did—he reiterated that he had exhausted his administrative remedies. After reviewing the file and listening to the arguments of the lawyers in a nonevidentiary hearing, the district court dismissed the petition, essentially incorporating by reference the KDOC's position that the petition was untimely and Woods did not outline a constitutionally protected liberty interest that had been compromised because of his extended placement in restricted housing. Woods has appealed the district court's judgment for the KDOC.

LEGAL ANALYSIS

A district court may dismiss a 60-1501 petition based on the written submissions and the argument of the lawyers only if that record “conclusively show[s] that the inmate is entitled to no relief.” Denney v. Norwood, 315 Kan. 163, 174, 505 P.3d 730 (2022). When a district court dismisses a petition without hearing witness testimony or receiving other evidence, as happened here, we review the determination without deference. Denney, 315 Kan. at 175. An appellate court stands in as good a position as the district court to assess the petition and other filings in the record precisely because the district court has not been called upon to make credibility determinations among testifying witnesses or to otherwise resolve conflicting evidence. The lawyers’ arguments do not alter that standard; they are not evidence.

Because the district court did not hold an evidentiary hearing, we must accept the factual representations in the petition and the supporting documents Woods submitted to the district court. At this stage in the case, we likewise do not credit any conflicting representations the KDOC offered in its filings in the district court. Denney, 315 Kan. at 175. But we do credit uncontroverted facts presented in those submissions. 315 Kan. at 173.

Timeliness of Woods’ Petition

Under K.S.A. 60-1501(b), a prisoner must file their petition within 30 days after the action is final, exclusive of the time taken to exhaust any administrative remedies. Applying the prison mailbox rule to the chronology in the record, Woods filed his petition within 30 days after the KDOC Secretary's designee rejected his grievance in the March 20 letter. Woods received the letter on April 16, triggering the 30-day period to file his petition. Woods presented the petition to prison officials on April 30 for delivery to the clerk of the district court. That presentation constitutes the date of filing for purposes of the prison mailbox rule because a prisoner has no control over how diligently the officials receiving the filing may act in delivering it to the appropriate judicial recipient. Wahl v. State, 301 Kan. 610, 615, 344 P.3d 385 (2015) (recognizing and applying prison mailbox rule: pro se inmate's legal submissions deemed filed when presented to prison officials for mailing to court). Absent the rule, prison authorities could stymie inmate litigation simply by holding a prisoner's requested filings until after any deadline for submission had passed. For purposes of this appeal, we do not understand the KDOC to be disputing that the petition was filed within 30 days of the March 20 letter.

Rather, the KDOC argued in the district court that under the proper grievance procedure for an inmate challenging their placement in a prison, the final decisionmaker is the warden, so Warden Howes’ March 3 letter denying Woods any relief on his request to be placed in the general prison population ended the grievance process and began the 30-day period under K.S.A. 60-1501(b) to file a petition. The district court accepted that position and found the petition to be untimely. The KDOC repeats its argument on appeal.

Represented by a new lawyer on appeal, Woods principally contends that his grievance did not concern his classification and placement because he specifically sought a plan that would allow him to be released from restrictive housing into the general population. We find the contention unpersuasive. Woods fundamentally wanted to be placed in the general population, and if that could not be done immediately, he wanted a set of concrete things he could do to accomplish that goal. The grievance focused on changing Woods’ placement. It cannot realistically be sliced and diced into something else.

But Woods has made a secondary argument to the effect that the KDOC undercut his grievance and any judicial consideration under K.S.A. 60-1501 by asserting at the end of the administrative process that he had been using the wrong procedure—after Warden Howes had informed him that the procedure included an appeal to the KDOC Secretary. And, in turn, he contends the KDOC and the district court impermissibly relied on that shifting position as a valid basis to treat the petition as untimely. We agree.

The KDOC uses multiple grievances processes for inmate complaints, each with its own procedures and forms. An inmate must determine which process to use. Here, Woods used what we understand to be the “general” grievance process, although there is a separate process for challenging placement within the system, e.g., restrictive housing. The record shows that the final decision-maker in a grievance over placement is the prison warden, so there is no administrative appeal to the KDOC Secretary. To reiterate, Warden Howes—the last decision-maker for Woods’ grievance—not only failed to so inform Woods but affirmatively misled him into believing he could (and needed to) appeal to the Secretary to exhaust his administrative remedies. And Woods understood he had to exhaust those remedies before he could file a 60-1501 petition.

In the district court and now on appeal, the KDOC has tried to exploit that false representation to craft a procedural defense to the petition on the grounds Woods filed outside the 30-day deadline in K.S.A. 60-1501(b). Under the circumstances, the tactic is, at best, a shabby one. But shabby is not necessarily improper. So we consider impropriety. We do so without weighing whether the KDOC's intricate grievance system serves some legitimate management purpose or has been adopted largely to thwart inmate grievances with a procedural maze.

We start with the 30-day statutory deadline. The appellate courts have recognized that K.S.A. 60-1501(b) imposes the legal equivalent of a statute of limitations for filing petitions rather than a jurisdictional requirement. As such, the limitation may be waived or forfeited and is subject to equitable exceptions. See Battrick v. State, 267 Kan. 389, 394, 985 P.2d 707 (1999) (finding 30-day time in K.S.A. 60-1501[b] to be statute of limitations); Gray v. Schnurr, No. 127,952, 2025 WL 1276815, at *2 (Kan. App. 2025) (unpublished opinion) (citing Battrick, 267 Kan. at 401, and characterizing K.S.A. 60-1501[b] time period as statute of limitations rather than jurisdictional); Knittel v. Kansas Prisoner Rev. Bd., No. 111,552, 2014 WL 6777450, at *3 (Kan. App. 2014) (unpublished opinion) (as statute of limitation, 30-day period in K.S.A. 60-1501[b] subject to equitable exceptions); see also In re Bell, 317 Kan. 334, 339, 529 P.3d 153 (2023) (equitable estoppel may preclude application of statute of limitations when party has through “acts [or] representations” induced second party to rely on that conduct to their detriment).

The Kansas Supreme Court has recognized an equitable principle it terms “quasi-estoppel” that precludes a party from shifting factual or legal positions in an unfair way. Wichita Fed'l Savings & Loan Ass'n. v. Black, 245 Kan. 523, 536, 781 P.2d 707 (1989) (“Quasi-estoppel applies where a party has previously taken a position which is so inconsistent with the position now taken as to render the present claim unconscionable.”); Harrin v. Brown Realty Co., Inc., 226 Kan. 453, 458-59, 602 P.2d 79 (1979) (quasi-estoppel extends to party's “assertion of rights inconsistent with past conduct” or where party unconscionably attempts to take a position inconsistent with earlier position it has “acquiesced” to); see Oxy USA, Inc. v. Red Wing Oil, LLC, 51 Kan. App. 2d 1028, 1038, 360 P.3d 457 (2015) (recognizing doctrine). Equitable doctrines tend to be applied in fact-specific circumstances to remedy substantially unfair conduct that would undermine the resolution of legal disputes. See Bouton v. Byers, 50 Kan. App. 2d 34, 41, 321 P.3d 780 (2014) (“Because promissory estoppel rests on fairness, its application tends to be especially fact driven and, thus, defies any regimented predictive test.”).

The case for applying quasi-estoppel here is compelling on the present record and really undeniable. Warden Howes, the final decision-maker on Woods’ grievance over his placement in restrictive housing, affirmatively and falsely represented that Woods could administratively appeal his denial to the KDOC Secretary. And in doing so, Warden Howes laid the foundation for the untimeliness argument the KDOC then presented to the district court in response to Woods’ 60-1501 petition. So the KDOC essentially submits: We falsely told you the grievance process entailed an additional step, reasonably anticipating you might file a 60-1501 petition, and we now argue that you should be thrown out of court because you did what we said you needed to do to complete the grievance process. The inequity and the resulting distortion of the judicial means of dispute resolution is manifest. We decline to countenance that kind of litigation strategy.

Applying quasi-estoppel to preclude the KDOC's untimeliness argument also aligns with the purposes of judicial estoppel that prevents a party from taking one legal position in an action only to argue a different position to gain an advantage later in the action—an unseemly course of conduct that undermines the integrity of the adjudicatory process. See State v. Hargrove, 48 Kan. App. 2d 522, 548-49, 293 P.3d 787 (2013) (outlining judicial estoppel doctrine and recognizing its application “to preserve ‘the essential integrity of the judicial process’ ”) (quoting New Hampshire v. Maine, 532 U.S. 742, 750, 121 S. Ct. 1808, 149 L. Ed. 2d 968 [2001]). Here, the KDOC's misrepresentation to Woods straddled the prison's internal grievance process and the later judicial determination of his related action under K.S.A. 60-1501. Whether we label the doctrine we rely upon quasi-estoppel or judicial estoppel, the result is the same. Either principle applied here would serve the same fundamental goal of discouraging deceptive practices aimed at unfairly gaining the upper hand in a case.

We find that, on this record, the district court improperly dismissed Woods’ petition on the grounds it was untimely filed.

Sufficiency of Woods’ Constitutional Claim

The district court alternatively dismissed the 60-1501 petition for failing to state a constitutional claim grounded in due process protections. Based on the limited record available to the district court and to us on appeal, we find the district court erred in that conclusion.

In his 60-1501 petition, Woods has asserted a procedural due process claim under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. He essentially argues that the KDOC has kept him in restrictive housing without affording him any means or opportunity to be released to the general prison population, as by a hearing or (as he more directly asserts) a specific plan for transfer upon satisfying identified criteria. A procedural due process claim has two components—a legally recognized property right or liberty interest and the denial of a fair opportunity to protect that right or interest against a wrongful deprivation by a government agent. See State v. Gonzalez, 57 Kan. App. 2d 618, 623, 457 P.3d 938 (2019) (“The essential principle embodied in the Due Process Clause is this: The government may not deprive a person of a property right or a liberty interest without affording that person the opportunity to be heard in a meaningful way and at a meaningful time to avert a wrongful deprivation of that right or interest.”); see also Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319, 333, 96 S. Ct. 893, 47 L. Ed. 2d 18 (1976) (“The fundamental requirement of due process is the opportunity to be heard ‘at a meaningful time and in a meaningful manner.’ ”); Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co., 339 U.S. 306, 313, 70 S. Ct. 652, 94 L. Ed. 865 (1950) (The Due Process Clause “at a minimum” requires that “deprivation of life, liberty or property by adjudication be preceded by notice and opportunity for hearing appropriate to the nature of the case.”).

In both the district court and here on appeal, the parties have confined their arguments to whether Woods has shown a protected liberty interest. They have not addressed what process he would be due if he has a liberty interest. We similarly limit our discussion of the issue.

In his petition, Woods alleges he had been held in restrictive housing since late 2020—now for more than five and a half years—and identifies some ways he says that the placement imposes more severe limitations on him than on inmates in the general prison population. In response in the district court, the KDOC pointed to some ways in which Woods has not been restricted, such as having a prison job. But neither party offered a comprehensive explanation or a detailed list of the ways Woods has been treated in restrictive housing as compared to inmates in the general prison population. Based on the record, we must find that Woods has shown he has fewer privileges and freedoms in restrictive housing than do general population inmates.

In Jamerson, the court recognized that the extended placement of an inmate in restrictive housing either as a punitive measure or a management tool could implicate a constitutionally protected liberty interest depending upon the duration of the special confinement and the particular conditions or limitations imposed. 304 Kan. at 685-86. The court concluded that the confluence of restrictions and their duration presents a heavily fact-based inquiry into whether an inmate has established a protected liberty interest. 304 Kan. at 685.

Here, Woods has presented a colorable claim for a liberty interest based on the uncontested duration of his confinement in restrictive housing and his references to limitations on his freedom apart from the usual incidents of confinement in prison. The KDOC's response simply refers to some ways in which Woods has not been restricted. As the Jamerson court pointed out, a conflicting and largely undeveloped record typically would call for a remand with directions for the district court to hold an appropriate evidentiary hearing. 304 Kan. at 686. In that case, Jamerson had been in what was then called administrative segregation for over three years when he filed a 60-1501 petition challenging his continued restrictive confinement. Here, Woods has been held in restrictive housing for a measurably longer time.

Given the limited record developed in the district court and the allegations in Woods’ petition and related materials, we find that Woods has stated a colorable claim for a liberty interest that has been materially compromised by his extended placement in restrictive housing. The KDOC's submissions do not conclusively undermine the circumstances Woods has depicted. We, therefore, reverse the district court's determination that Woods has failed to allege a protected liberty interest as a component of his due process claim.

The district court's judgment for the KDOC dismissing Woods’ 60-1501 petition is reversed. The case is remanded to the district court with directions to reinstate the petition, to appoint a new lawyer for Woods, and to hold an appropriate hearing and otherwise proceed as necessary to adjudicate the claims in the petition.

Reversed and remanded with directions.

Atcheson, J.: